Gdansk, Portrait of a City by Peter Oliver Loew was published in German 13 years ago, now an English translation is available at Oxford University Press. This complicated history is not very well known outside the region, so the translation is welcome. In the past, German, Polish-Lithuanian, Russian and Scandinavian powers fought over the important port city on the Baltic Sea. It is a slim volume, with a broad and colorful narrative. Loew writes that the history of Danzig/Gdansk “has been rewritten so often and with such contradictory interpretations” (184), that it gives the impression of concerning completely different cities. Loew has been defending history before. When the former Polish government intervened in the outstanding Second World War Museum in Gdansk, in order to replace a broad history of suffering with tales of Polish heroism, he wrote a sharply critical assessment together with Paveł Machcewicz who created the museum.

Danzig/Gdansk was a small coast settlement at the Vistula River, its hinterland reaching far into the continent, with good conditions for trade. Germans, Poles, Kashubians, Jews and others lived there. From the 1220s, it had connections to the Hanseatic League. The Teutonic Order, wielding the sword and the cross, set out to Christianize the heathens of Prussia and the Baltic coast. They conquered the city in 1308 and built their main stronghold in Marienburg/Malbork, outside Danzig. Under the rule of the Teutonic Order the city grew fast, but with restricted freedom.

Before that, it had been part of the fascinating Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth, administratively loose and religiously tolerant. Commonwealth forces went to war against the Teutonic Order in the fifteenth century. Danzig participated and asked for the protection of the Polish king. The rule of the Order was finally shaken off in 1454. In a characteristic look forward, Loew shows that this victory was described as liberation from the criminal Teutonic Order in a newspaper in 1854, a disastrous step in 1904, liberation from the crusader's yoke in 1954, and finally celebrated with a multi-cultural festival in 2004.

200 years of golden age of Danzig followed. The city had privileges; its own currency, freedom of trade, religious freedom, land surrounding the city; aristocratic castles were not allowed nearby. It became a prosperous hub of culture and trade. Restorations of Gdansk in the twentieth century aim to go back to this period. The city was mostly German-speaking and mostly Lutheran, still multilingual, still religiously tolerant. Social differences between the elite and day laborers from the surrounding countryside increased. The city grew larger than Hamburg, but its trade depended on corvée labor. Merchants did not improve or innovate procedures; inventive Dutch merchants could easily outcompete them. From 1655 on, the city suffered from the Nordic wars between Poland, Russia and Sweden, and afterwards, its decline was quite rapid. In the wars of the eighteenth century, Danzig lost much of its trade and became a backwater, the Polish-Lithuanian empire also declined. In the second partition of Poland, Danzig was captured by Prussia. It was the end of the autonomous city.

Loew underlines that Danzig, mainly German speaking, often preferred Polish rulers. Under Prussian rule in the wake of Napoleon, the development of economic and political nationalism was bad for trade and the diverse population of the city. By the First World War, it had morphed into a regular German city. In the peace agreement, it was made a free city again, but did not revert to its previous glory. Instead, after the 1930's depression, Nazism met with enthusiasm. In the late 1930s, the Jewish community fled the city.

The Second World War started in Danzig. After the Molotov-Ribbentrop pact, on September 1, 1939, a German warship bombarded the port where a Polish army detachment had a base. Nazi abuse on one hand, destruction by the advancing Red Army on the other followed, as in many other eastern German cities.

Nationalism was the order of the day as the war ended. In the peace agreement, Gdansk became part of Poland. Previously the city had changed rulers, but the inhabitants were more or less the same. In 1945, becoming Polish meant that all the Germans were expelled(vertrieben) in an ethnic cleansing. Into the empty houses, displaced Poles from the eastern region, which had become part of Soviet Ukraine, moved in. In this way, the disruption was thorough.

Inside the Eastern bloc, trade became less important, industries developed, among them large shipyards. Parts of the old town were outwardly restored, behind the pompous façades the houses contained small apartments for ordinary wage-earners. In the outer areas, the usual towers of flats grew up in the sixties. Polish workers protested at several occasions. The trade union Solidarity in Gdansk's Lenin shipyard, backed up by intellectuals and led by the charismatic Lech Wałesa, made a huge difference. The iconic pictures of men in work clothes and dirty faces, holding a united front, became a force communist leaders could not ignore. With the “discipline, consistency and Romantic-patriotic ethos” of the strikers (215), Gdansk took the lead in overthrowing communist governments in Europe. Meanwhile, the market economy destroyed the foundations of industrial protest.

The slim volume thus covers enormous events. Loew knows the city well. He moves easily between time layers, sometimes too easily for a less knowledgeable reader. His accounts of political intrigue are mercifully short, he is more interested in local culture, ethnicities and the economy, which is fine. The main theme is the important role in European history of one city, not the most prosperous or the largest, on the threshold between Eastern and Western Europe, in a vulnerable position between Russia and Germany. Another important theme is the author's exposure of partisan history writing, which did not cease with Poland becoming an EU state.